We started our day very early with a 4am wake-up call for a chance at a balloon ride. The weather was still a little iffy, but they hadn’t flown the day before and today looked better.

We fly to Cappadocia in the late morning. Today is the last day of Ramadan, tomorrow is Eid. In Turkey, they use the term Ramadan Bayrami.

Today we visit the Hippodrome area, Hagia Sophia, and the Taksim square area.

We started with the Topkapi Palace first thing this morning because we’re near the end of Ramadan and there would be more visitors in the afternoon than in the morning.

We arrived in Turkey late this afternoon.

To visit the cave at Carlsbad Caverns National Park you need a timed entry ticket. We had gotten tickets for early afternoon. We got ours about a week in advance and it was filling up.

Donna didn’t want to do too much after yesterday’s long hike on Guadalupe Peak. In the morning, we went to the Living Desert State Park on the north side of Carlsbad.

Today we hiked up Guadalupe Peak. The trailhead doesn’t have much parking, and the previous day was very windy, so we expected that this hike would be very popular today. We tried to get going early and arrived at 7:40am getting one of the last parking spots. There is additional parking lot 2/3 of a mile away.

Today was forecast to be very windy, up to 55 mph gusts, so we chose McKittrick Canyon as our hiking location for the day. The winds would be crossing the canyon mostly, not roaring down the canyon.

We arrived late last night and didn’t get going so quickly in the morning, and we made a stop for lunch groceries before going out to Guadalupe National Park. We arrived around 11am and the visitor center parking lot was full and they had rangers out directing folks to other places in the park.

We headed to Beaver Marsh early in the morning to get another chance to look for otters. We didn’t see much.